Who Is a Child? Histories of Children and Childhood

Human rights activists have been especially attentive to the use of child labor in the Global South, while some scholars have called for historical explorations of children’s productive activities in the past so as to formulate policies for ending it in contemporary society. To analyze African childhoods, scholars must contend with contemporary images of African children as victims. Modern news cycles often represent African children as abandoned, exploited, used in warfare, emaciated, and diseased.4 In 2004, Beverly Grier, a historian of Africa, pleaded with other Africanists to “take children more seriously in their research,” arguing “that children have shaped and continue to shape history in Africa in significant but hitherto largely untold ways.”5 Grier’s suggestion came at a time when scarce research on children’s contributions to family economies existed.6 The static notion of “African childhood” must be challenged and understood as a “social construction that varies in time and space.” Scholarly theories about what constitutes “childhood” are largely based on social and political factors, which include the “patriarchy, capital, colonial and post-colonial states, and children themselves.”7 Looking to early twentieth-century reformers concerned about child welfare in the Global South offers some insight into what those political motivations might have been.

From the 1920s onward, child advocates and human rights activists made evident their interest in children’s health programs, access to education, and child labor conditions resulting in the formalization of scholarship in the social sciences.8 Evelyn Sharp’s 1931 report on the International Conference on African Children, organized by the Save the Children International Union, serves as a comprehensive collection of the investigations and reform efforts focused on the well-being of children throughout imperial holdings. As part of the document, G. Mondaini’s Royal Institute of Economic and Commercial Science (Rome) report underscored instances where increased child pawning, slavery, marriage, and labor abuses transpired with the influx of European colonialism and industrialization. To reinforce the pattern, Sharp detailed instances of child pawning as “illicit slavery” like that which existed in Liberia.9 The case of Liberia is significant because of the global attention garnered regarding recruiting and labor practices, which sent laborers to the island of Fernando Pó located off the coast of Nigeria, in the Guinea region.

Spain had established the colony of Fernando Pó in 1778 and struggled to procure labor for its palm plantations during the early decades of the twentieth century. At issue were the disreputable, independent labor recruiters who swindled prospective laborers into signing labor contracts with false promises.10 The subpar working conditions and labor abuses of the mid-1920s resulted in the 1930 Enquiry Commission to Liberia, an investigation requested by Liberians. Subsequently, the League of Nations’ International Commission on Slavery determined the process of recruitment and the resulting labor conditions to be indistinguishable from “slave raiding and slave trading,” essentially describing “contract workers” as “slaves.” By September 29, 1930, the president of Liberia, C. D. B. King, issued a proclamation demanding an end to all forms of pawning and the release of domestic servants. In the aftermath of the investigation, the British Foreign Office promised the Liberian government that the League of Nations would address the issue in January 1931.11 It is evident that concerns about the welfare of African children in the colonies from the 1920s to the 1930s, specifically regarding the institution of pawning and domestic slavery, received increased global attention. It is within this historical context that I examine child trafficking in its various forms in Southeastern Nigeria.

The study of children as historical subjects is necessary to fully understand the complexities of social, cultural, economic, and political histories. Yet scholars have only begun to consider “children” and “childhood” as formal categories of analysis in the past few decades. Early thinkers, however, did call upon the intellectual community to pay attention to childhood as a significant moment in a person’s life. Scholars have granted credit to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) for identifying adolescent needs and philosophizing that the life experience of a child, known as “growing up,” was a process worth paying attention to.12 It was not until the twentieth century that historians truly focused on children and childhood as legitimate categories of research. Philippe Ariès diverged from beliefs that children existed as miniature adults, positing that children and the historical concepts of childhood changed over time.13 He argued that childhood, a social construction, formed during the modern period, creating domestic spaces fraught with tension and violence based on hierarchies and discipline. And as notions of childhood expanded, so too did histories of children and childhood.

Since the 1960s, historians have continued to map the lives of children and adolescents. Scholars increasingly situated children’s histories in the context of family histories, emphasizing intimate relations in the household.14 By the 1980s, histories of children and childhood experienced a downturn, and women and gender came to the fore.15 Histories of children developed as an offshoot of and at times in tandem with histories of women and the family, and by the last decade of the twentieth century, children’s contribution to the household became a major interest.16

Comprehensive histories that focused solely on children and childhood developed during 1990s as children’s productive activities faced intense scholarly inquiry.17 Childhood scholars have drawn attention to topics spanning childrearing, girlhood, children’s literature, psychology, adolescence, disabilities, orphanhood, and labor, among others. Related to the central category for analysis in this book, child labor, Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason have asserted that parents’ love for their children did not exclude the need for their labor as it was a matter of survival and “that the value of children was still measured in the services they performed.”18 This argument, while valid, stops short of prioritizing the children’s bodies and associated labor as the literal embodiment of transferrable wealth and as producers of wealth. To fully understand the value of children, we must center their productive activities within family economies.

Child labor is most visible in the poorest sectors of society. As Colin Heywood has observed, “People today react indignantly to reports of children still working in the ‘sweatshops’ in Western societies, not to mention the millions employed in the poorer countries in the world.” In part, this attention to and anxiety about child labor invited academic interest in agricultural communities that use very young children as farm laborers and hired hands. It is clear that class distinctions come into play when the study of child labor is pursued. Hugh Cunningham suggests that “the most obvious manifestation of poverty is the division between children who are an expense to their parents throughout childhood and beyond, and those who, through work of some kind, contribute to their family economies.”19 This analysis falls short of recognizing the value of a child’s corporeal being. It is the child’s body and labor that can translate dependency and expense into economic contribution and wealth. Childhood dependency is a condition in which parents and guardians have access to and control over children’s movement and their productive activities. It is this control that has garnered growing attention, especially when exploitative practices are identified. The concern about child welfare is broadly based on the child’s age and ability to invoke personal agency and maintain personal safety. Therefore, reviewing how various stakeholders define child is crucial.

Defining children as a protected group that should not be exploited is relatively easy. Doing so according to age, however, is a bit more complicated. The British and American laws that attempted to circumvent the use of child labor generally defined “childhood” as lasting until age fourteen to sixteen (depending on country and locality), after which adulthood began. However, the selection of a specific age seemed arbitrary to some. In 1911, Scott Nearing, secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, asked, “What is the purpose in setting an age limit for child labor and why was that limit set at fourteen?” He suggested that childhood should be defined according to the child’s maturity and not marked by national standards.20 Nevertheless, the terms child and childhood are largely informed by Western labor laws that developed during and after the Industrial Revolution as social reformers set out to define children as a protected demographic so as to keep them safe from labor abuse.21

The drawback of using the Western classification of maturity as a measure by which childhood is demarcated is that it does not take into consideration other cultural norms that distinguish children from adults. As Audra Diptee and Martin Klein have noted, numerous concepts about childhood existed throughout the African continent during the colonial era, which included notions of age as well as experiences. In Igbo society, for instance, the age-grade system “is the most important agent of socialization apart from the family.” It is a collective of the same or similar aged individuals within a community who are trained to participate in duties that serve their families and the public. Under common leadership, children prepared for their role in society according to their age grade. For example, Uche Dike explains that boys spent leisure time by participating in “hunting, fishing, playing,” and learning activities together.22 Should any member of an age grade behave in an immoral manner, it was up to the collective to reprimand the guilty party. These self-monitoring groups remained intact until after marriage. It is through this pattern that boys and girls became men and women through various initiation rites. Lisa McNee explains that should a young person fail to undergo the appropriate initiation(s), “they would remain a child in the eyes of society regardless of his or her age.” However, the colonial period served as a unique moment when children and youth challenged prevailing social structures.23 The social norms and expectations that informed the behaviors of children and parents in Nigeria’s precolonial era transformed with the onset of colonialism and in this way further challenged the notion of childhood.

The Persistence of Slavery fills a historical void by highlighting how British colonialism altered childhood for the most vulnerable. Even though other scholarship has focused on the history of children and slavery in a global context, as well as the productive labor and sexual abuse of children, there exists no other book that details how children, through their fluid statuses—pawns, slaves, child brides, and traffickers—were essential in wealth procurement for families, communities, and the colonial state.24 Some scholars have explored more contemporary modalities of child slavery, which demonstrates a shift from the predominate practice of focusing on the adult male slave, but they fail to offer a comprehensive account of the widespread trafficking of children at the end of the transatlantic slave trade and beyond. The following chapters provides an in-depth breakdown of humanitarian efforts and legislative attempts to identify and end child trafficking and slavery in colonial Southeastern Nigeria.25 In contrast with previous scholarship, I illustrate how economic conditions, including moneylending, introduction of new colonial currencies, and the fluctuation of indigenous currency values shaped the movement of children under various forms of guardianship. Other historians of child slavery and of children and childhood have not explored this symbiotic relationship as a central category of analysis.

Africanists have documented the increased need for domestic labor as the transatlantic slave trade came to an end, concentrating on child mobility, constraint, and opportunity, with limited attention to humanitarian and antislavery efforts.26 In contrast, my work stresses the importance of individual actors—humanitarians—who demanded an account of the varied uses of Southeastern Nigerian children, as well as the contributions of women who participated in the 1929 Women’s War, thereby creating a rich colonial record that documented known forms of child pawning, child slavery, and child marriage.

By all accounts, historical scholarship on children in Nigeria during the colonial period is limited. The texts that do exist, however, illuminate the ways in which children, families, and colonial authorities attempted to negotiate the changing social, economic, political, and cultural terrain. To date, the most comprehensive book on Nigerian children highlights the interplay between urbanization, the British social workers’ salvationist project, and elite Lagosian women’s modernization efforts in Western Nigeria. Abosede George shows that in their attempt to combat “unruly” children and youth, chiefly girl hawkers, British reformers and Nigerian women fought to control Nigerian children’s productive activities.27 George largely focuses on the cultural consequences of British colonialism as European gendered expectations determined acceptable behaviors for girls. My work diverges from George’s in that I prioritize the primacy of economic outcomes related to children’s movement and labor, arguing that the colonial environment disrupts Nigerian childhoods in ways that British cultural assimilations could never remedy.

Other more recent works that focus on Nigerian colonial childhoods examine how the label “modern children” came to define Nigerian youth. Saheed Aderinto posits that “modern African childhood” is born from Christian missionary efforts in West Africa during the early decades of the nineteenth century. He claims that “mission education laid the foundation of the modern conception of childhood” through the introduction of Western notions about religion, leisure time, labor norms, language, and personal identity. The educated class influenced the characteristics of modern African childhood well into the first decades of the twentieth century. While Aderinto acknowledges that colonial childhoods developed against the backdrop of families’ social and economic position, he mainly highlights constructions of childhood in terms of access to education. Such constructions include the consumption of colonial propaganda related to childrearing, allegiance to empire, acceptable forms of child labor, mobility, multiculturalism, and social programs. Missing from this analysis is how modernization, largely understood as a process born from imperialism, produced the globalization of Nigerian commercial markets that depended on child labor. As part of this modernization process, the codification of colonial law and moneylending practices created modern childhoods wherein certain groups of children became vulnerable to trafficking and slavery.28

Scholars have also analyzed the history of children’s involvement in social clubs, legislation concerning adolescents, and child labor.29 Yet, much of the scholarship concentrates on Western Nigeria, thus reflecting the glaring absence of books and edited volumes attentive to children in Southeastern Nigeria during the colonial period. However, when commodity commerce replaced the international trade in slaves, the Aro (Igbo subgroup), the main agents of the slave trade, began to depend on agriculture to withstand the massive change in trading norms in order to maintain an influx of income.30 As palm oil production increased, as did the need for credit, so too did the demand for labor and moneylending. It is within this context that we can understand how children and their labor filled those needs.

Documenting how children’s bodies represented collateral in financial practices is central to understanding the interdependency of personal finance, social contracts, and external, local, and global factors. Anna Mae Duane argues that “although children are often excluded from the calculus of who counts as a slave, they have long been central to defining slavery itself,” precisely because of the child’s vulnerability and dependency on others.31 Children should be historicized, in their own right, as slaves. As such, my work emphasizes the vulnerability and dependencies of children, which allowed for their subordination and enslavement. Analyzing Southeastern Nigerian oral narratives from those who remember how children became pawns, child brides, and slaves produces critical insight.

Children continued to be an integral part of the local and colonial economies after the transatlantic slave trade (1519–1867), during which slavers seized 1.6 million Africans from the Bight of Biafra. By mapping the movement of children, as embodied forms of wealth and as transferable laborers, this book distinguishes itself from others. The study of the social economy of children during the colonial period allows us to once again revisit “slavery’s twentieth century problem.”32

Revisiting Slavery’s Twentieth-Century Problem

What is slavery? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask. In this contemporary moment, it is likely that those focused on modern-day slavery would provide examples of sex trafficking during the Super Bowl, child slavery in Ivory Coast cocoa farms, or perhaps prison labor in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic where New York prisoners make sixty-five cents or less per hour producing antibacterial gel.33 These are twenty-first-century examples of various forms of forced or coerced labor, but the questions remains: How did we come to define these phenomena as instances of slavery? The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”34 If we assume that there is a link between historical patterns of chattel enslavement, domestic slavery in Africa, and forms of oppressive modern-day servitude, would we be correct? To answer these questions, it is necessary to explore early efforts to end the transatlantic slave trade, the European seizure of African territory, the development of the cash crop industry, and the expansion of other mercantile enterprises.

The transition from subsistence farming peasants to wage-earning and taxpaying colonial subjects did not happen spontaneously in the twentieth century. When Africans did not meet colonial labor needs, administrators instituted coercive practices that resulted in “emerging labor systems” that were “more oppressive than slavery,” often involving child labor. Suzanne Miers and others have regarded the resulting tyrannical labor systems as slavery’s twentieth-century problem. To further elucidate the contradiction, Jean Allain argues that even though many Western countries denounced slavery, colonizers believed that imperial holdings could not be civilized without forced labor.35 So how, then, did forced labor differ from slavery?

The 1885 Berlin Declaration set in motion a reconfiguration of the use of African labor. The attendees of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference agreed to support the end of the slave trade by land and sea. In an attempt to gain unanimous agreement to legitimize imperial holdings, representatives promised to ensure the well-being of and improve moral standards (according to European norms) of indigenous peoples and denounce domestic slavery. Not until the signing of the Berlin Act of 1890, through which Europeans championed their colonizing mission under the guise of raising Africans from their “heathen” state and ending slavery, did European powers plot out territorial boundaries for nearly all of Africa.36 Decades before the Berlin Conference, when profits from the transatlantic slave trade waned, the formalization of their influence on the continent increased as Europeans sought other methods to reap economic returns from Africa and its peoples. At the behest of Western demand, plantations and cash cropping multiplied, especially in West Africa’s palm oil industry, and labor needs surged in the decades that followed. For example, Calabar dominated the palm oil trade in Southeastern Nigeria from 1906 to 1929. Women generally controlled the palm kernel trade, while men governed the trade in oil.37 Clearing land, planting, harvesting, transporting, and participating in public works projects helped build and maintain agricultural trade. The British surmised that this process of developing legitimate trade would ultimately curtail the slave trade.38

In the face of “legitimate” agricultural and commercial development, vigorous efforts by abolitionists to end chattel slavery throughout the Americas and the Caribbean fell short as it related to domestic slavery in colonial Africa. The trade in palm oil, ground nuts, and other agricultural goods required domestic slave labor that ensued concurrent with and subsequent to the transatlantic slave trade. Robin Law coined the term “ ‘legitimate’ commerce” as a way to describe commercial activities that could not successfully thrive without forced labor and argues that “in-part, this growth in slavery within West Africa reflected the increased use of slave labour in the production and transport of exports for ‘legitimate’ trade.”39 As a play on words, the development of “legitimate” commerce, as opposed to the transatlantic slave trade, created an environment that necessitated and profited from coerced labor. Even more so, the advent of colonialism in Africa produced heightened labor mobilization and control, trends that persisted throughout the colonial era.40 Abolitionists sought to end slavery in the late eighteenth century and more readily focused their efforts on immobilizing the transatlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.41 With potential access to new forms of wealth, both Africans and colonial officials set out to amass the labor needed for commercial enterprise.42 Therefore, the ways in which colonial administrators deployed African labor merits consideration as a way to understand why some indigenous customs regarding child slavery went largely unchecked.

Many nineteenth-century abolitionists and humanitarians celebrated the collapse of the transatlantic slave trade as a noteworthy success even though domestic slavery rose exponentially in its aftermath. This “reinvention and reconfiguration” of slavery deserves scholarly consideration, especially as it relates to children. Prior to colonization, slavery on the continent of Africa served many purposes. Individuals became enslaved as a result of wars, misdeeds, and being born into slave lineages. There existed “open and closed slave systems,” and those born in a closed slave system were generally precluded from discarding their social status. Open slave systems provided opportunities for slaves to achieve “status mobility,” and it was not uncommon for slaves to be integrated into family structures.43 Otherwise, some societies expelled “criminals and abnormal children” by selling them to people outside their community or used them for ritual sacrifices and for “settling conflicts.” The heightened reliance on child labor occurred with twentieth-century European incursion on the African continent. Benjamin Lawrance submits that this period should be considered “the beginning of the age of child enslavement.”44 If historians of slavery reimagine this period as a time when African child labor was central to colonial economic structures, the reverberation of the abolitionist movement falls short of absolute triumph.

Expanding beyond the 1926 Slavery Commission definition and its 1953 amendment, scholars have defined and redefined historical and contemporary applications of slavery. Slavery, as an institution, denied the slave of any legal rights, making him or her a form of commercial property, a “capital investment.” For instance, Martin Klein summarizes a slave as an “outsider, someone who is ‘seen as property,’ ” adding that “the dependence of a slave originated in an act of violence and its continuance required action.” Paul Lovejoy explains that slaves did not control their own labor, sexuality, or reproductive abilities, which ensured that the owner had access to any financial or human capital that resulted from owning the slave.45 No matter the formal definition, labor practices akin to slavery proliferated throughout the African continent.

Contract labor, more accurately described as forced labor, became the common method of securing labor for public works projects. Even in the face of international scrutiny, colonial administrators understood that ending all forms of forced labor would diminish colonial earnings and “threaten both the production of exports and the generation of revenues.” Moreover, prohibiting men and women of high social status from maintaining their slaveholdings would “have alienated local collaborative elites and disrupted the economic base of their power.”46 In addition to slavery and contract labor, pawning was another method by which individuals leveraged labor and secured access to loans.

Southeastern Nigerians utilized the institution of pawnship as the main way to guarantee loans during the economic stress caused by colonial policies. And through this method, hundreds, if not thousands, of Southeastern Nigerian children were thrust into domestic slavery.

Pawnship, a form of legal dependency in which a pawn was held as security, became a widespread labor condition in various parts of Africa in the twentieth century. The pawn’s labor paid the interest on a debt until the debtor reimbursed the moneylender. Paul Lovejoy and Toyin Falola explain: “Kinship, marital bonds, or some other clearly recognized social status was supposed to safeguard individuals from excessive abuse, prevent the transfer of pawns to third parties, or obstruct other acts that the debtors might consider inappropriate or illegal.”47 In addition to pawning a child or young dependent for a loan, chiefs and elders in the community offered youth, in their place, to perform conscripted labor for the colonial administration.48 In precolonial pawning cases, parents and guardians expected to redeem their children once the loan had been repaid. Distinct from pawning, panyarring was a form of foreclosure on a loan.49 If a debt remained unpaid, debt collectors could “seize” the debtor or his or her dependent until they received the payment.50 In the case of girls when parents failed to repay the debt, their daughter likely became the moneylender’s bride or that of one of his or her dependents. Nefarious moneylenders also sold pawned girls to work as prostitutes.51 Even though betrothing young girls to a man was a normative practice, reselling them to strangers was not.

A variety of sources help inform the growing economic histories focused on debt and the mobilization of juvenile labor in Africa. European merchants, seamen, and anthropologists documented pawnship practices. Martin Chanock describes the institution as a normal moneylending system practiced during colonialism. The social contract created by a moneylending agreement would “cement ‘relationships of obligation and dependency.’ ” Current scholarship dedicated to the institution illuminates how the practice of pawning enabled Africans to engage in commercial activities, pay debts, formalize marriages, bury family members, and survive famines. More specifically, the research presented by Lovejoy, Falola, Judith Byfield, David Richardson, and Felix Ekechi historicizes pawning, taking into account global economic factors. These works help us understand how Africans mitigated their economic circumstances in the face of colonialism.52 However, attention to the exchange of children and their labor is incomplete, resulting in limited perceptions of the methods by which Africans dealt with colonial economic distress. My analysis adds another layer to existing histories by prioritizing children’s lives and productive activities as they existed as pawns and in other economic capacities and serves as an example of an economic anthropology that centers children.53

Insolvent populations pawned children for temporary loans for a variety of reasons.54 As the Igbo-speaking people attempted to deal with the faltering economy, many borrowed to meet fiscal responsibilities. Such individuals sought patrons, known as ogaranya (“persons with some property”), for the purpose of obtaining loans. Fundamentally, the pawn existed as both a dependent of another individual and part of an economic transaction. The nature of that dependency—as a subordinate to another family member or as a pawn to a nonrelated ogaranya—generally determined whether pawns, especially children, would ever be redeemed. While pawning existed before colonization, the institution became more prevalent as Nigeria’s internal economy became increasingly integrated with the international economy. At such time, pawning had become a “legal category of social and economic dependency” often certified before witnesses.55 After Nigeria became a British protectorate in 1901, the British allowed Nigerians to pawn themselves and some dependents when circumstances necessitated. Archival materials provide confirmation that this practice continued well into the 1930s albeit transformed. Evidence shows that a once legal and public practice (when an adult pawned himself) evolved into a social and economic institution, which resulted in the creation of what some consider one of the darkest elements of Nigeria’s shadow economy during British occupation.

British Trade and Occupation of Nigeria

During the nineteenth century, the transition from supplying slaves during the transatlantic slave trade to the development of the prominent palm oil industry created a need for credit systems in Nigeria, which allowed Britain to establish control over trade operations and oversight of credit agreements. Credit agreements allowed sellers and buyers to operate along Nigeria’s coast. In 1856 the British established a Court of Equity in Calabar to monitor and rule on disputes between the local traders and British firms.56 The 1860s were an especially turbulent time for established oil traders and suppliers because of the constant struggles over access to oil-supplying regions in the interior and oil prices. During this period the demand for credit increased as African brokers and small-scale traders sought to access it. The requirement that traders submit large capital deposits resulted in growing demands for credit by small-scale traders who did not have the prerequisite funds. In this context, moneylending transactions increased as did disputes over loans, and resulting debt cases demanded colonial intervention.57

By 1870, the British established Courts of Equity in Opobo, Brass, Okrika, in the Niger Delta and in the west from Bonny to the Benin River. The courts’ goal to maintain “a certain amount of law and order among the wild ‘gentleman’ of the commercial community of the coast” suggests that moneylenders acted recklessly when handing out loans.58 The Courts of Equity continued to settle disputes over trade and debts between European merchants and African traders as a way to maintain peace and the flow of goods.59 The economic crisis of the 1880s, during which palm oil prices plummeted, caused loan defaults and resulted in bankruptcy for some of the largest European trading firms. For example, the National African Company (later the Royal Niger Company) that established a monopoly in the palm oil trade on the Niger River went bankrupt when oil prices fell, leaving them with numerous outstanding debts.60

In another instance, the court intervened in German merchant transactions that allowed African traders access to large amounts of credit, resulting in frequent disputes when debts went unpaid.61 Over time, managing the mounting debt cases became untenable. The credit disputes that existed between Europeans and Africans spurred British attention, and by 1900 Britain had imposed the Recovery of Credit Proclamation, which prevented British intervention in recovering debts for other European traders. The prevalence of moneylending caused so many inquiries that “it was considered that ‘trust’ was given out to such an extent, and so recklessly, that legitimate trade was being seriously damaged by it.”62 The British argued that the breakdown of moneylending agreements directly destabilized trading markets and sought more control over the trade.

Colonial Nigeria evolved in several stages as the British gained more control over the trade in palm oil during the mid-nineteenth century. The British formalized its occupation of Nigeria with the Anglo-French Convention of 1898, and in 1900 the area was divided into the Colony of Lagos and the Protectorates of Southern and Northern Nigeria. As high commissioner of Southern Nigeria (1903–6) and the governor of the Colony of Lagos (1904–6), Sir Walter Egerton (1858–1947) was appointed to oversee the merger of the northern and southern administrations in 1904.63 The amalgamation resulted in the development of three focal provinces in the south with capitals in the Eastern Province at Calabar, the Central Province at Warri and the Western Province of Lagos. Each province had an assigned commissioner.64 In order to gain control of the region, the British led a military assault, the Aro Campaign of 1902, on the slave-owning elite of northern Igboland. From 1904 to 1909, the army slaughtered hundreds, and the British forced thousands who survived to work on infrastructure projects, such as “road construction, stream clearance, and the building of government guest houses.”65 In 1906 the southern territories were united into Lagos Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. In an attempt to streamline administrative practices across Nigeria, the British enacted a plan to unify the colony by establishing indirect rule, a system in which they aimed to appoint local chiefs to oversee assigned localities in the southwestern, eastern, and central parts of the country under British governance. In 1905, Lord Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, who later served as governor in Northern and Southern Nigeria (1912 to 1913) and governor-general (1914 to 1919), issued a memorandum that mapped out his goals, which included the development of a railway system, a plan to regulate trade in natural and agricultural resources, and, perhaps the most often written about, the development of a judicial system based on a uniform policy.66 By 1906, Southern Nigeria’s governing structure was comprised of four district commissioners, three district officers, and nine divisional commissioners, all of whom worked under the high commissioner (figure 2).

In 1914 the Colony of Lagos and the two protectorates of Southern and Northern Nigeria became the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. By World War I, the political boundaries and administrative structures had been established. The formal creation of the Colony of Nigeria transformed the Bight of Biafra’s economy and radically changed the indigenous forms of governance, which ultimately affected the lives of children.67 The administration moved quickly to develop an infrastructure that would create an export-oriented economy, which it hoped would lead to self-sufficiency. When the British first introduced systems of compulsory labor for public works projects, they extracted labor from coastal canoe houses (defined in chapter 1). They also commissioned village leaders, some of whom they designated as warrant chiefs, to supply personal slaves, pawns, and other dependent persons for work. As a result, chiefs forced children and men to comply with colonial work orders, producing unfree labor systems, a policy that attracted the protests of antislavery humanitarian groups in England and sparked a debate within the Colonial Office about the wisdom of using corvée labor.68

By 1914, Lugard finalized plans to implement Nigeria’s new governance structure.69 At the time of Lugard’s appointment as governor-general, the Southern Nigeria Protectorate encompassed a patchwork of colonially structured polities and scattered native courts in the southeast. To his “orderly” military mind, this was chaos. Lugard initiated governance changes that sought to create a common, rationally organized local governing system. Lugard refined the system of local government, known as “indirect rule,” that allowed the appointment of local men as warrant chiefs who carried out the colonial administration’s orders in Southeastern Nigeria. This form of rule mirrored what Britain had applied in the Islamic north and allowed Nigerian men to function as judges over native courts. However, imposing indirect rule on Igboland proved problematic because, unlike the north, the region consisted of small, autonomous units without chiefs. The previous indigenous system was largely based on councils of men and sometimes women related by kinship, lineage, and seniority in spiritual and professional capacities. Therefore, the newly appointed chiefs drew the ire of their subordinates. The warrant chief system and colonial court structure did not replicate native governing practices and would be cause for social upheaval.70 The application of Lugard’s policies had notable economic consequences and labor implications for Southeastern Nigerians.

Chapter Outline

The Persistence of Slavery is organized into five chapters, followed by a conclusion. Chapter 1 surveys the development of British colonial rule in Nigeria and documents how the advent of colonialism transformed local governing bodies, domestic slavery, and economic conditions. In the era of conquest, I focus on the transformation of the local economy into a colonial economy, the move from the transatlantic slave trade to the trade in palm oil products and other agricultural goods and its effect on domestic slavery. Conflicting colonial policies about coerced labor, primarily in the canoe house systems (trading centers), attracted international attention that resulted in antislavery critiques about the use of child laborers, especially pawns, in the trading institutions.

Chapter 2 looks closely at the post-1914 Lugardian reforms of indirect rule. New rules governing coercive labor and moneylending agreements left some Igboland residents seeking economic relief. Additionally, the implementation of the warrant chief system and removal of the district officers who provided oversight of the native court system left residents vulnerable to warrant chief abuses. I explore how local inhabitants with limited access to colonial authorities became reliant on warrant chiefs, court clerks, and other court members to mediate disputes. By analyzing court documentation of debt cases and evaluating how the influx of British currencies affected Nigerian personal and commercial activities, this chapter illustrates the particularly difficult economic realities that some families, especially women and children, endured.

Chapter 3 considers the development of concern for the well-being of African children that grew with increased organizational attempts to end child pawning, marriage, and domestic slavery. Women’s groups, antislavery lobbies, and humanitarian organizations, based primarily in the League of Nations, shifted their attention to the trafficking of women and children in an effort to end domestic slavery in Africa.71 This chapter also examines the reformist agenda at a time when British policies focused on generating revenue from Nigeria as the success of the colonial economy necessitated various forms of coerced labor.72 While social reformers in Europe, the United States, and Canada worked to improve the well-being of children in their respective countries, they also began to define acceptable conditions of African childhood. And it is within this context that my analysis pays critical attention to girls as child brides, slaves, and pawns as concerns about human trafficking increased.

Chapter 4 offers a new perspective on the 1929 Women’s War by reconsidering the women’s motives for participation. In addition to the well-known reasons cited for the uprising—taxes, decreased export prices, and increased import costs—women lost their children through the institution of pawnship when they needed loans to pay colonial taxes. I examine the increased tensions between women and political authorities, mainly the warrant chiefs. The chapter also shows the similarities and differences between the 1925 women’s dancing movement and the 1929 revolt. We see a continuation of concerns about financial instability, the decrease of women’s political influence, and a desire that women’s economic endeavors be secure from male infringement. This chapter shows that, among other reasons presented by scholars for nearly fifty years, the overall economic stress of the late 1920s propelled women to protest the loss of their children through pawning.

Chapter 5 focuses on the aftermath of the 1929 Women’s War and the ways in which colonial officials responded to international pressure to investigate child trafficking and examines British ambivalence about ending the traffic in pawns. By pressuring colonial officials to investigate child dealing, the League of Nations ensured the development of colonial records that identified specific stakeholders in child trafficking practices. In particular, this chapter provides an overview of women and children as victims and as traffickers. Identifying women and children as trafficking agents upends the assumption that women and children should have been defined as mere dependents in need of protection.

The Persistence of Slavery is a significant contribution to histories of Africa, children and childhood, women, slavery, and labor. Human rights groups and policymakers are seeking ways to understand the legacies of human trafficking so as to develop policies that would limit and, if possible, end child trafficking. Understanding the long history of human trafficking in Nigeria will assist that effort. The limitations of this book are represented in the types of the available archival material. Court and colonial records are likely to have misrepresented some Nigerian accounts and lack a significant number of firsthand testimonies from children. I rectify this absence through the use of oral testimonies by including oral histories from current-day residents of Aba, Calabar, Enugu, and Owerri that offer rich details and describe the cultural practices that allowed a child to move from one form of guardianship to another.